(Shai Norton's random stuff about penguins and writing and … stuff.)

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My Year of Bread and Air (and Stuck)

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein (likely misattributed).

I baked a lot of bread this year. One or two loaves a week (three loaves a week on a few occasions), even the week of Mom’s funeral and the subsequent weeks of family-related and work travel.

I have been on planes this year more than I have any other year of my life — but there has still been bread in the house, each homemade loaf a little (and occasionally quite a bit1) different, even those weeks I’ve had all the ingredients I needed on hand and the last thing I wanted to do was experiment.

The bread did run out during a couple of those business trips, which inspired @bhoneydew to capture all the scrawled-on-butter-stained-printout hacks I’d made to the basic recipe I started with and bake a couple of loaves himself. Both of them came out differently than any of mine, and different from each other, even though he followed the same steps each time.

And … this is the paragraph where I was stuck for two weeks (I started writing this blog post on my birthday). It was a unique sort of stuck for me: until December 19th, it was a stare-at-a-page-and-no-words-come-out stuck as opposed to a write-ten-paragraphs-think-they’re-messed-up-and-delete-them-all-before-anyone-else-sees-them stuck. Though since this isn’t the first time this has happened this past year, I guess I should stop calling it ‘unique’. I should just call it ‘2016’s stuck’, and hope the year doesn’t forget it in the house when it heads out the door in a couple of weeks, especially if the door smacks it on the butt so hard that it falls down the front steps, because that should so happen.

My chirpy ambitiousness about being able to do NaNoWriMo and a massive work project and finish a networking class all in the same November timeframe? Yeah, that was me trying to flip off 2016 before it’d turned its back. I should know better, I really should, but I did get the two most important things on that list done, so there’s that. The bread still happened.

1The first time I used the “Proof/Warm” setting on our oven to proof a loaf, I didn’t notice that the temperature read “Hot” instead of “Brd”. This killed most of the yeast and made for a very dense brick o’ bread.

About Shai

I’m an absolutely normal person. Abysmally normal. Hideously normal. So white bread and uptight that it’s not even funny. In some ways, I’m probably just like you, only repressed, unsociable or bound by a non-disclosure agreement.

I write. I analyze. I ask a lot of stupid questions. I solve problems, and I create new ones. I can break processes, software and brains (seemingly) simply by being in close proximity to them. That used to alarm me, then people started paying me to do it. I got over it.

I find data soothing.

I’m not sure I’ll ever finish going to school, because I don’t know everything yet and yeah, that bugs me. Sometimes, I have a mental soundtrack. That should bug me more than it does.

I’m married to a Certified Genius. We’re still trying to figure out this parenting thing (and pretty sure that it’d be easier to send a bag of cats to Mars). We have a son. Singular. We’ve had cats. Multiple. We like our son better, even if he’s more complicated.

Way more complicated.

We sometimes look at dog owners with blatant envy.

We move every four-five years or so. Six years ago, we relocated from Northeastern Pennsylvania to Northern Virginia. We’re twitching a little.

Modus Dementi is supposed to be Latin for ‘demented mode’, but since I don’t know Latin, it probably isn’t. Google Translate suggests that it’s ‘stupefied by the mode of’ … and I can’t argue with that at all.

I do, however, know French — a peu, parce que j’ai suivie de cours à l’université. Démenti means ‘contradiction’. The term’s often used to mean the official or formal denial of the truth of a report. I’m not quite sure what that says about this blog’s narrator.